Yesterday morning started with ships and sea smoke 40 minutes before sunrise off Lake Superior’s Splitrock Lighthouse. The day ended with the 60 minutes prior to sunset with a royal Snowy Owl Flush… both a beautiful female and male! By the time I got home I was thoroughly frozen. With the temperature hovering around 0F (-18F), even with decent gloves it is impossible to keep the hands warm. While it was much colder during my morning sea smoke photoshoot (-18F or -28C), when photographing owls there is a lot of waiting for action which is when one gets bone cold.
Snowy Owl Take-Off (female or first year male)
Sleepy … or laughing at me Snowy Owl (male)
The male Snowy even slept through a diving attack from the female pictured first in this blog post. It was too cool to be bothered.
Great big mounds of plowed snow gave me the ability to almost see “eye to eye” with the owls. Was fun being up at their level 10 to 12 feet off the ground… but still a bit distant. My Canon Sx70 has a 65x optical zoom, which is a 1365 35mm equivalnet. On bright, sunny days the super zooms work very nicely.
Are these and other owls having problems getting voles and rodents with our snow cover?Do they move further south to get to less snow cover or how do they cope??Thanks for sharing spectacular photos..I really enjoy them!!Sally Stout free
Sally … the owls are not presented with too much problems by our snow depth. Great Gray Owls actually hunt by hearing mice and voles running underneath the snow. The GGO’s actually punch through the snow with their talens and do fine. There are quite a few Northern Hawk Owls around this winter, and although they are sight feeders, their amazing eyesight allows them to hunt just fine. This kind of owl actually will cache prey just like we store food inmthe refrigerator. Finally, Snowy Owls are also sight feeders and often catch larger prey (rabbits, squirrels, rats, etc). The Snowies find the industrial area good hunting!
Great BIF images with the SX70.
Snowy Owl photos were taken with my Sx70. The seasmoke images used my Sony A6300.